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A Wireless Hotspot For Your Car — Why Not?
nk497 writes "UK mobile operator 3 has unveiled a wireless hotspot for cars. It's essentially a repackaged version of their MiFi wireless router, which lets users create their own wireless hotspot using the 3G network. While drivers will hopefully steer away from using the web at the wheel, 3 predicts the mobile hotspot will let passengers entertain themselves as well as offer a hookup to email, music and traffic data."
Not 'Why not?', but rather 'Why?'
will work great with this:
http://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Office-WM-01-Laptop-Steering/dp/B000IZGIA8/ref=pd_sim_auto_1
Does "three strikes" shut off your car?
Been doing this for years.
1. Plug HTC WM phone into charger outlet.
2. Activate WMWiFiRouter app to share out Sprint 3G over USB, wireless, or bluetooth.
3. ?????
4. Profit!
Da Blog
Awesome! You could steer your car with one hand while holding a game controller in the other while playing a friend. Double points if its a driving game.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Now I can look forward to people driving and twittering and emailing and watching youtube. On second thought, the resulting mayhem might be fun to put on youtube. It has a sort of Escher-esc appeal to you it. Jackass recorded on youtube crashing while watching youtube.
This has been available for a year and a half or so on Dodge vehicles as an option: http://www.dodge.com/en/2009/ram_1500/innovations/uconnect/
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
Why put a GPS tracker on the car in a mandatory and inflammatory fashion, when you can simply embed it in a product that's too good for the masses to pass up?
They would chase you down with their black van equipped 'bandwidth compliance team' then charge you for 3 full connections, retroactively, for 12 months.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Anyone I've had in my car for the past several years, especially anyone who has an interest in being 'entertained' in a car, already had their own mobile internet and/or networkable device. Why would anyone want to splice an already-slow 3G connection between several people and/or devices?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
While drivers will hopefully steer away
Unlikely. I rarely commute by private transport, but when I do I am constantly blown away by the complacency that a large number regard the difficult and dangerous act of navigating a tonne and a bit of highly destructive, high kinetic energy, projectile of latent death that is the humble car.
Eating bowls of cereal, doing your makeup, reading the newspaper, SMSing, talking on the phone, watching a DVD, fiddling with a number of gizmos : GPS, MP3 etc. And soon - updating your facebook profile.
Geekpowa: Stuck in traffic again. This sux. [comment] [like]
http://dension.com/index.php?pageID=238
(disclaimer: no affiliation whatsoever)
Yep, a mobile phone is a much more natural way of doing that. Why pay for yet another contract?! Using WiFi Tether on Android whenever the need arises.
This would work great with the UK's plan for a new Digital Economy. On no, wait - it won't. Can't have open wi-fi any more. Can't have any sort of Internet connection where anyone using it cannot be tracked down and punished for allegedly infringing copyright.
Of course, according to Stephen Timms, Minister "for Digital Britain", if someone was worried about wireless connections being used by other people, he "could introduce a password so that somebody driving up outside his house would not be able to use his [connection]". So wireless is perfectly secure. Although this is the same person who was recently caught referring to an "Intellectual Property (IP) address" so possibly not the best person to be running our digital economy.
I've been waiting for the day where I can finally congest a road and a 3G network simultaneously!
Amen. Works perfect on the G1 with Cyanogen's mod and T-Mobile doesn't seem to care.
(name withheld by request)
heaven knows what he was doing with it, I doubt that wifi was available while moving let alone public in his range...
seen conversions for it into various vehicles on the net...
hell if anything cars are becoming filled with too many distractions, my friends cx7 has more than a dozen buttons on the steering wheel! Ford is equipping newer cars with customizable displays, some that are interactive through, you guessed it, steering wheel controls. These are at the same line as the speedometer, which means eyes off the road.
People already play with GPS devices because automakers make them easy to use while driving, yet since the majority respond to touch you have to take your eyes off the road.
Distracted driving now seems to be a feature of cars.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Will people be moving their houses around parking lots to scan for open Wifi spots?
Nokia N900 with Joikuspot. With true multitasking, you can run it in the background while also running the turn-by-turn navigation on the main screen. Just to annoy the iPhone addicts, run the media player and pipe it thru your FM radio with the built-in FM transmitter.
It'll even gracefully handle a call while doing all that, properly muting the music and gracefully interjecting the voice commands from the GPS.
I've had it do all that once, just to show it could be done. Be sure to have the phone plugged into power, or your battery is going to drain faster than you can believe.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Me too. I currently use my android based phone with a 'wifi tether' app, which can share the 3g over wifi or bluetooth. I have a CarPC in my car for wife/kids, it gets internet from phone, so they can surf on long trips.
One word: kids. Drop one of these in place, hand each of 5 kids a Nintendo DS, and watch them play games and leave you alone for the entire trip (At $190, even the new DS XL is cheaper than a netbook, as well as traveling better.) I already have an AC inverter plugged into the "cigarette lighter" DC plug for the purpose of recharging Nintendos and cellphones.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Its called a 4G WiMax connection and a battery powered router. Sure it only works in the chicagoland area, but I don't really leave the chicagoland area, so its just fine for me. 10megs down 1 meg up anywhere I want. The ping isn't the greatest, but its still good enough to play Quake 3.
The teachers will crack any minute, purple monkey dishwasher.
Well, isn't this what you use Connectify for? No need for extra hardware and maybe even an extra subscription for the dongle.
I'm doing just this right now with a rooted Cliq, wireless tether utility and T-Mobile. Mainly because a family member has zero Internet access. It's 3G speed, so not the fastest of connections, but good enough to get onto Slashdot, as well as the usual other sites while waiting for stuff. Plus, I'm also streaming a song and downloading an update for iTunes, so it is a fairly decent solution.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I only use it for podcasts.
The first time I tried it I was like, no $%^4 it works!
The next time I tried it, I was like wow, I can change tracks on my phone from my steering wheel!
The next time I tried it, I turned it up to a decent enough level and was utterly disapointed.
Now I use bluetooth for making calls, usb for "my music" aux in for my wife's zuneHD.
I have a soney MEX-BT5700. Maybe it's just sony, but I'm not a huge fan of bluetooth for anything but recieving calls in the car. That and to get the music fxs to work correctly, I have to disconnect and reconnect it every time I get in the car.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Other than the bandwidth cap, this sounds like a good idea.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Any jailbroken iPhone and the MyWi app works perfectly for this sort of thing as well.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Distracted driving now seems to be a feature of cars.
Well sure, but it was in the past as well. Ever since they added those pesky vanity mirrors, radios and (gasp) passengers, drivers have been finding themselves splitting their attention between driving and distractions in the car.
On the way home from Easter I was absolutely bugging the hell out of my wife by looking at her while she was driving. Just looking. Not saying or doing anything else. I had to stop before she wrecked and killed us all. No electronics involved.
Because it's pretty clear that the humans aren't paying attention to the road anymore.
Actually, all of the HTC phones that run Windows Mobile can get the HTC wifi sharing app (looks @ phone) - on my touch pro (ATTfuze) it's in the comm manager at the bottom. It will share the media net connection without having to pay for the "tethering" program.
I've used it just a handful of times that I needed to test openvpn for clients. No one has fussed about it yet, and from what I've read, unless you're insanely idiotic about bandwidth on the computer/phone (torrent of a DVD etc) really there's no reason that ATT would ding you for it.
I do have to wonder if ATT would at some point look for something simple in the packets - like the laptop broadcasting that it is a member of a domain etc - to see if someone's tethered though.
Karnal
Last year we took a three week road trip with two teenagers in tow. I have a Verizon aircard and configured my tablet to act as a hot spot. Diving for those thousands of miles was made easier by having the teenagers distracted by being able to be online at anytime from the back seat with their laptops. Surprisingly I had usable signal for about 90% of the trip, except for in Yellowstone, Death Valley, and out near Promontory Utah.
You dont need to jailbreak - just be outside the US. I can tether a number of devices concurrently to my iphone over bluetooth and share the net connection.
Autonet Mobile (http://www.autonetmobile.com/) has been doing this for years.
They're a bit late.. Tugrik did this what, almost 10 years ago?
http://www.stompboxnetworks.com/
My email addy? should be easy enough.
Radar detectors + automobile hot spots + a little GPS mashup goodness and we should be in for some real fun in the courts.
Don't forget the EFF on your holiday gift list this year...
Not news. Chrysler does this in most new cars: uconnect
And while I'll not even once mention my long promised flying car (lying bastards !) we could AT LEAST have K2000 type cars. ...
I'll even give up the james bond options like jumping 20 feet and the rest (might keep the blond on a lease plan...and I won't keep the hasseldoff option 8p)
But at least a car that is autodriven and fully connected...
bonus points if it can fly ?
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I could see this being the true death of the radio. At least the radio in the current AM/FM format. I can't think of how many times I've wished my car had some kind of access to the internet so that I could listen to last.fm.
The first time I saw a LAN in a car was San Diego Usenix in ?1993?. It was Phil Karn's (KA9Q) car, and it was really just a thinwire Ethernet neatly installed from the front seat to the trunk. Laptops were much bigger then - he had a large clunky 386 machine in the front seat, and the alpha and beta versions of the Qualcomm cellular radios in the trunk. We were able to connect to a cell site at something like 9600 baud, and telnet to the Bell Labs firewall, which happily rejected our attempt to log in as "berferd".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I work in the cellular industry, and this isn't new, other than being kinda small like the MiFi. If you wanted WiFi with a cellular backhaul in your car, you could have gotten that from Linksys, Cradlepoint, or JBM (now Sixnet) and others anytime in the last few years that I've been in this industry, probably much longer. If you were content to get an Ethernet connection and add your own WiFi hotspot, the list expands to Airlink, Bluetree, Digi, etc. And that's just off the top of my head.
Of course, geeks will always find a way. A friend of mine in high school created a dash-controllable MP3 stereo system for his car in 1999. He had an entire PC running Linux in the trunk and the display was re-purposed from a home security system. But that's not exactly a consumer-friendly setup.
If everyone had good cheap connectivity in their cars, it would spell the end of broadcast radio as we know it. I have mixed feelings about that, but I for one would love to be able to pick up on-line radio stations while driving long distances. Or stream audio books from my own server, or even, heaven forbid, some kind of audio book rental service. Heck why do you need an ipod when you can listen to streaming music on-demand anywhere? Of course the RIAA is likely to jump on this idea and push the entire market to a stream-only, pay-per-play market.
If it works like the GPS/radio in my car, driver distraction will be a moot point, because it'll decline to function unless the parking brake is on. :-)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Thats nothing new and was in fact even implemented as a standard option in the Maybach 62 in 2002. Yes I know its not a cheap car, but nevertheless hardly worth the news. Just my 2c.
Of course I'd just end up duct-taping a GSM dongle/phone to a wifi router, but...
The fact remains, they charge too much for data in north america, i can't justify paying for service for it, but the hardware isn't a problem.
Sent from my PDP-11
Would people tailgate in fear of losing reception on Pandora? Weird. Carrying a MiFi or smartphone to tether seems more practical to me. This must be for the very rich and foolish.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9978037-7.html
I might point out that it did wonders for Chrysler car sales, as well.
As Meehawl has pointed out, Sprint has been doing this for years. What he didn't mention is that Sprint has offered the MyFi 5-user mobile hotspot (3G) for years, and has just released the Overdrive (4g) as well. At $99, it's sort of a no-brainer - that's what most of the single-user mobile broadband cards cost. My Sierra Wireless 3G card is getting a little long in the tooth, and this seems like a great replacement. Of course, it's not as small and easily portable as one of the mobile hotspots, but I'll give up a little room in my bag if it means my wife and/or colleagues can get online as well. Very handy. What's funny is that the article even *mentions* a mobile hotspot. But I'd rather have a 4G version, and the ability to pull it out of the car and take it with me to meetings, coffee shops, etc. rather than be tethered to a car. With the car charger I'll be able to use it in the car if I want, but don't *have* to. There seems to be no apparent reason to get this device, unless a mobile hotspot isn't available in your area. (Which, considering this article describes a demo that took place in the UK, is quite possible.)
Uploading audio to your car while you're sitting at your desk.
Nexus has had their HAWK product out for a long time. It is a wireless router for cars that accept pcmcia air cards and a single wired connection. Has secured wireless AP hotspot built in with remote access, VPN and ipsec tunnels, etc. They are popular with a lot of police organizations.
Also, the Pepwave MAX Mobile Router seems like a much better option, especially if you are looking for a more reliable connection, since it accepts multiple types of connections, so you can have more than 1 provider (say one on Verizon's network, and one on Sprints, load balanced together, or if one drops it fails over to the other). They are also significantly cheaper than the Nexus product.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
You joke, but step 3 is easy for me: 'work'. I often use WMWifiRouter to have full access to the web on my laptop everywhere, and it's very useful in my like of work. Here in Amsterdam the average 3G speed beats the low tier ADSL easy. And the contract is no big deal, I already have unlimited fast 3G for € 10 per month. easily worth it. Oh and while were recommending great software: if you add Pocket Player (google it) you can also stream thousands of radio stations over the mobile net! I hook my phone to my car to get exactly what this device offers with the added bonus of unlimited great music.
Joikuspot, works for nearly any phone that users can install apps on.
Hey... you can't have a sense of humor about this, just because I made a joke. You're supposed to respond like the moderators, go on about trolling and stuff. What's wrong with you, anyway?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.